John Lennon’s song, Imagine, apparently one of the best-selling songs of all time, contains the thought, Imagine there’s no religion- no Heaven above us and no Hell beneath us. It’s impossible to imagine a world with no religion because as William James’ famous dictum says, man is incurably religious. Even those who claim to have no religion have a religion, whether it be Humanism, Atheism, Hedonism, Christianity, Islam etc. etc. Modern Humanism declares, promises of immortal salvation or fear of eternal damnation are both illusionary and harmful. By what authority they say this escapes me.
Is it “pie in the sky by and by”? What if there is no Heaven? It would mean that God works to no purpose. Would the world be a better place as Lennon opined? We labour to no end. Life is meaningless. Pascal in God Is Not dead yet , speaking from the atheistic position said, I do not know who put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I am myself. I am terribly ignorant about everything. I do not know what my body is, or my senses, or my soul, or even that part of me which thinks what I am saying, which reflects about everything and about itself, and does not know itself any better than it knows anything else.
I see the terrifying spaces of the universe hemming me in, and I find myself attached to one corner of this vast expanse without knowing why I have been put in this place rather than that place, or why the brief span of life allotted to me should be assigned to one moment rather than another of all the eternity which went before me and all that which will come after me. I see only infinity on every side, hemming we in like an atom or like the shadow of a fleeting instant. All I know is that I must soon die. But what I know least about is this very death which I cannot evade.
Just as I do not know whence I come, so I do not know whither I am going. All I know is that when I leave this world, I shall fall forever into nothingness or into the hands of a wrathful God. But I do not know which of the two states is to be my eternal lot. Such is my state, full of weakness and uncertainty. And my conclusion from all this is that I must pass my days without a thought of seeking what is to happen to me. Perhaps I might find some enlightenment in my doubts. But I do not want to take the trouble, nor take a step to to look for it: and afterwards as I sneer at those who are striving to this end, I will go without fear or foresight to face so momentous an event, and allow myself to be carried off limply to my death, uncertain of my future state for eternity.
What he is saying in effect is this: Compared to the cosmos he is a miserable speck of dust, and yet he is greater than the cosmos because he knows that he is nothing. His interests, his misery, his boredom, his delights, pleasures and exertions – none of these is lasting. Everything ends in disappointment. His history is a history of uselessness and frustrated hopes. From the moment when he takes his first breath, his life is condemned to end in death. Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.
Bertrand Russell said; That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and belief, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labour of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noon-day brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins – all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. But this was the man who wrote, I think of suicide very often.
Robert Ingersoll used to rant and rave about the foolishness of Christianity, but at his brother’s graveside he said: Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud – and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word. But in the night of death Hope sees a star and listening love can hear the rustling of a wing. He who sleeps here, when dying, mistaking the approach of death for the return of health, whispered with his latest breath, “I am better now”. Let us believe, in spite of doubts and fears, that these dear words are true of all the countless dead.
The reality of Heaven is reflected in the general population as a natural desire. Most people I ask about the possibility of going to heaven answer in the affirmative:- either “yes”, or “I hope so”, or “I’d like to think there was a Heaven” (Cf. Eccles. 3:11 – He has put eternity in our hearts). We are not the only ones interested in Heaven. Billions of people across the centuries have been interested in it. Thousands of sermons have been preached on it, countless songs about it have been sung billions of times. The word Heaven has been etched on millions of tombstones, articles without number have been written about it, and only God knows how many books written about it. It has been on the lips of of so many as they left this life for the next. We are talking about a subject of agelong, universal, and eternal interest. Topics change with the moods of the times and the fashions of the periods, but Heaven remains a perennial subject of serious thought by the young, middle-aged and the elderly. We all contemplate it because, as the poet said, Our hearts like drums are beating funeral marches to the grave.
If there is no Heaven there is no ultimate justice and fairness in the world, all of life is a fleeting vanity and all hope is hopelessness.
Do thoughts of Heaven make man too heavenly minded to be of any earthly use? Do they put his head in the clouds? A fello named David Burton converted from Baptist to Catholicism. Over the next few months he noticed that the same Catholic chaplains who had welcomed him into the fold were reticient to discuss salvation’s reward. He found this disturbing. I felt a real lack in my life – there was this hope of Heaven I felt we all should have. But the priests didn’t like to talk about it. As soon as someone said, “Lets do this so we can go to Heaven”, someone would say “no, no, no, no, let’s do it because we should do good. It got to the point where I began to think that Heaven was too much like an ace in the hole, that it was sort of like cheating. I almost felt guilty thinking too much of Heaven. We should think about Heaven (1 John 3:3). Our attitude about Heaven will be reflected in our attitude toward life. Is Heaven as real to us as it was to Peter and Paul? We lament that Hell is not as hot as it used to be, but has the deceitfulness of riches and the pleasures of life caused us to forget that this world is not our home? Remember Demas, the former gospel preacher who forsook Paul having loved this present world? (2 Tim. 4:10). And as to the charge that thoughts of heaven makes a man of no earthly good, the simple answer is to look first at Christ, then at the apostles, the founders of the Christian heavenly doctrine. These men laboured in view of Heaven but it was they who changed the world for the better. Christ, ,for the joy set before Him, and the apostles counted their abundant labours as nothing to be compared with the glory to be revealed in them. They, like their counterparts before them, freely admitted that they lived on this earth as exiles and foreigners with their eyes fixed on their true heavenly home.
What is Heaven like? C.S. Lewis said, Heaven is the secret we cannot hide and we cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience….We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it. Imagine standing at Sydney Cover the morning Captain Cook came ashore and you explain that you have come back in time from 2023. And so you explain how that ships come from England to Australia in a matter of weeks, not months; in fact. we fly in planes that carry 300-400 people at 1000k.p.h. and makes the trip in hours. We live in homes where switches run everything except the kids: lights, cooking, air-conditioning (what’s that?), T.V. (what’s that?) and so on. It is safe to say it would be beyond their imagination. God has the same problem in telling us about Heaven.
A girl was born blind and her mother would take her hand and touch things and explain what they looked like. In the garden she would talk about the colours of the flowers and the grass. Finally, through surgery, the girl was able to see, and when she went into the garden she exclaimed, Mum, why didn’t you tell me it was so beautiful?! All the mother could say was, I did my best but there was no way you could understand until you saw it.
A poll conducted by TIME magazine in 1997 asked, Which of the following do you believe are in Heaven?. Angels – 93%. St. Peter – 79%. Harps – 43%. Halos – 36%. Interesting, to say the least! One wonders where people come by these ideas.
One of the enduring ideas of Heaven is the concept of POSSESSION. We sing a song about Heaven that has the line where my possessions lie. The ancient Israelites at the end of their wilderness wanderings were told to go in and possess Jordan. We never possess anything permanently here. Ever watch a sunset? In the tropics the twilights and sunsets are shorter than in the south. My Dad would see a sunset and run into the house to get his camera but by the time he got outside again the sunset had changed. (we found many photos of sunsets in his possessions when he died). Abraham left Ur looking for the promised land that would be his possession. When he finally got there and walked up and down in it he still never really possessed it. His descendants would possess it, but then each of them would in reality only possess it for a few years of their earthly sojourn – that’s the only kind of possession the earth affords. We bring nothing into the world and we carry nothing out. You’ve never seen a hearse towing a removal van.
Things are so fleeting here – look forward to a holiday and before you know it it’s over and you’re back to work tomorrow. Time is destructive, not only because it ages but because it creates fleetingness. Nothing lasts, time marches on and precious moments are lost and cannot be recalled or recaptured. But in Heaven time will not be a factor. It won’t mean a thing. How long did 33 years appear to Jesus?
What about attractions? When we go anywhere, we grade aspects of the place, and usually something is the main attraction. For example, a child might take a trip to California and the main attraction might be Disneyland. For me the attraction of Kabra (a little village outside Rockhampton) was the creek. What about Heaven? I don’t anyone who would seriously argue against the idea that the main attraction is God. (cf. Rev. 4). 1 John 3:2 says the saved will see Him as He is! That’s what He made us for – for Him! (Ps. 17:15.)
Then there is the reunion idea. It’s important to start these added attractions in our families, otherwise Heaven can be a rather lonely image. Get a bigger picture of the brotherhood. Can you imagine rubbing shoulders with the redeemed of all ages? What will it be like to chew the fat with Abraham, or Moses, or Eve or Esther? And when we tell our stories we’d better remember who’s going to be there. Some time ago we had lunch with some brethren in Gympie near the old goldmine exhibition. There was a measuring stick there with the heights of all the floods marked, going back to the 1890’s. I thought about all the old-timers who could tell about those floods but they wouldn’t want to tell about them in Heaven because Noah will be there! That would be a bit intimidating, wouldn’t it! I don’t think I’ll talk about the big flood in Rocky in 1954. I’ll just keep quiet till Noah moves away. In some ways it might be very intimidating to be around those who had trials of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover, of bonds and imprisonment: those who were stoned, sawn asunder, tempted and slain with the sword; those who wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented; wandering in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth. But then again, if and when they asked us of our situation in life, they might be absolutely amazed that without miracle, sign or wonder we believed in the Christ some 2000 years after the advent on the basis of a book, and that we kept our eyes on the prize despite the comfort and affluence our technology had to offer. They might say, We had nothing but the promises of God and the hope of Heaven in the world and we were glad to leave it – we don’t know if we would have been so willing if life had been as good to us as to you.
Heaven has the attraction of no more burdens. We groan in life (2 Cor. 5:2), but the answer is not disembodiment – that has its own problems. We want a body, a better one. Do we want a better home (John 14:2)? Do we want a better country (Heb. 11:16)? We live in the lucky country, but I can imagine how that would appeal to a refugee or one who lives in a third-world country or under an oppressive regime. Do we want a better city (Heb. 13:14). We lived for many years in the Garden City, but for the one Paul wrote to, his city was soon to be destroyed. It wasn’t the first time (Lam. 1:1). Cities not only represent home for most people in the world but also amenities. They are the goal of our travels usually – we don’t travel to a bush, or to a signpost.
What about the idea of no more death? That appeals to everyone. And there will be work to do there. The idea of rest has its appeal – after you’re tired from work. The idea of sitting on a cloud for eternity stroking a harp has no appeal to me, and neither should it. I want to do marvellous things, interesting things, challenging things.
Robert browning wrote to his wife, Grow old with me, the best is yet to come, the rest of life for which the first was made. There was a woman who had been diagnosed with a terminal illness and had been given three months to live. So she was “getting her things in order”. She contacted the preacher and discussed her final wishes with him. She told him what songs she wanted at her funeral, what scriptures she would like read, and what outfit she wanted to be buried in, and she wanted an open casket. She requested to be buried with her favourite Bible, and with a fork held in her right hand. The preacher was somewhat puzzled by the request and so the woman explained. In all my years of attending church potluck dinners, I always remember that when the dishes of the main course were being cleared, someone would inevitably lean over and say to me, “Keep your fork”. It was my favourite part because I knew that something better was coming—like velvety chocolate cake or apple pie. Something wonderful, and with substance! So I just want people to see me in that casket with a fork in my hand and I want them to wonder, “what’s with the fork?”. Then I want you to tell them: “Keep your fork, the best is yet to come.
Are you going to heaven? I’d like a dollar for every time I’ve asked that question. In many a conversation I have said, The bottom line is, are you going to Heaven?. And it is the bottom line isn’t it. If I miss heaven, I miss all. We were made for Him, to have an eternal relationship with Him. As Hell is the eternal shut out, Heaven is the eternal shut in. If I want nothing to do with God now, why should I expect to be with Him eternally? What preparations have you made?